‘Search’ Videos

August 19, 2016 — WordPress’ built-in search functionality leaves a lot to be desired. A LOT! Why is the default search so bad? What are the options for making search on your site better? In this talk I’ll cover a range of solutions for improving the search results of your site and integrating with WordPress.

Take aways:

How WordPress’ default search works under the hood.
What are some ways to make WordPress Search better.
What are key features when evaluating different search technologies.

June 30, 2016 — WordPress search is notoriously lacking. Why? MySQL is not search optimized. Elasticsearch is a scalable database that when coupled with WordPress produces extremely powerful results. This talk will cover what Elasticsearch is, why it’s important, and integrating it with a WordPress website using a 10up open source plugin called ElasticPress. ElasticPress has become increasingly popular in the WordPress community even being leveraged by popular hosting companies such as WP Engine.

December 10, 2015 — Mirroring WordPress data to Elasticsearch enables breaking some of the constraints that MySQL imposes on performance and relevancy. There is a high barrier to entry, but some strong benefits. I’ll survey the different use cases I’ve heard about, compare some plugins and libraries, and talk about the impact I’ve seen Elasticsearch have so far.

June 26, 2015 — How do you set up an informational site that has over 700 pages and is constantly growing? How will anybody find anything? By crafting the menu and template pages to show categories of items and allowing the user to filter the results. Through the use of custom taxonomies, template pages with custom queries and a faceted search result, we walk through how a site can be setup so that it can grow and maintain it’s consistent structure. Even if your project only has 70 posts, being able to cross-reference them with multiple terms so that no matter how they look for things, the information will be found, is very powerful.

March 2, 2015 — WordPress search is notoriously lacking. Why? MySQL is not search optimized. Elasticsearch is a scalable database that when coupled with WordPress produces extremely powerful results.
This talk will cover what Elasticsearch is, why it’s important, and integrating it with a WordPress website using a 10up open source plugin called ElasticPress.

January 16, 2015 — We like to focus on the things we know really well, and things we don’t deal with as often can be seen as “hard”. Search is one of those things that gets written off a lot, few devs I know will deal with it (voluntarily), and almost everyone will tell you “WordPress search sucks.” In this presentation you will learn that not only do you know more about how search works than you thought you did, but maybe give you a better understanding of how WordPress works as a whole, as well as showing you some cool tricks that you can do with WordPress search.